Judge At MH17 Hearing Rules That Compensation Claims Should Be Filed By February

Judge at MH17 Hearing Rules That Compensation Claims Should Be Filed by February

Relatives of those who died in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 should file their cases for compensation by February 1, presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis said at a hearing on Monday

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st August, 2020) Relatives of those who died in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 should file their cases for compensation by February 1, presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis said at a hearing on Monday.

"With regard to the time to submit claims for compensation, the court will determine that these have to be submitted by ultimately February 1, 2021," Steenhuis said, before suspending hearings until September 28.

Earlier in the day, a lawyer representing the relatives of the victims said that the lawsuits would be filed by this date.

The trial, which began in the Netherlands in March, has four defendants - Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko.

After taking off from Amsterdam, flight MH17 was downed by a missile in the Donetsk region while en route to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board the aircraft died in the incident.

Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics in the Donbas region have accused each other of shooting down the aircraft. The Russian authorities have criticized the Dutch investigation for ignoring radar data presented by Moscow, which it says shows that the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian Buk missile.